In early 2015, the University of Michigan’s Sigma Alpha Mu destroyed 45 rooms at Treetops Resort, a ski lodge near Gaylord, Michigan. The group broke ceiling tiles, destroyed furniture, and smashed windows, resulting in over $430,000 in damages. Officials at the resort said the fraternity was “unwilling to accept liability and pay restitution,” despite contrary claims from the organization’s president.

The University quickly suspended the fraternity for four years and the University’s president asked the national fraternity’s council to pull its charter, handing down “the most severe sanction that can be implemented against any campus student organization.” Three individuals have since been criminally charged for their involvement in the incident. 

Image via Dan Perry

In 2013, a Georgia Tech student who was serving as the social chair of the university’s Phi Kappa Tau fraternity sent out an email to members of the organization with the subject line: “Luring Your Rapebait.” The email detailed steps to getting women severely drunk at parties, hooking up with them, and promptly kicking them out of the room.

The member responsible for the email called it no more than a bad joke, but a subsequent investigation found it to be nothing of the sort. After an investigation, the chapter was completely disbanded for displaying a “pattern of sexual violence that . . . suggests a deep-rooted culture within the Fraternity that is obscene, indecent, and endangers women.”

Kira Kazantsev was crowned Miss America in 2014. She won the judges over with her bubbly personality, her reenactment of the “Cups” song from Pitch Perfect, and the fact that she was a trilingual honors student didn’t hurt either. Her 15 seconds didn’t last long though; it was soon very publicly revealed that prior to the Miss America pageant, she was kicked out of her sorority, Alpha Phi at Hofstra University, for hazing.

The joke’s on us, though: the Miss America Organization was apparently informed of the scandal beforehand, and no further measures were taken.

In October of 2010, Yale’s Delta Kappa Epsilon came under fire after an Old Campus pledge ritual in which the group shouted “No means yes, yes means anal,” among other offensive and misogynistic chants. The chapter’s president apologized for the fraternity’s conduct, but Yale’s feminist magazine Broad Recognition rightfully called for administrative action against the group. In May of 2011, the chapter was suspended from campus for five years.

You can view the pictures over on Huffington Post.

Clemson University in South Carolina suspended all 24 of its fraternities in 2014 after the death of Tucker Hipps, member of Sigma Phi Epsilon, whose body was found under a bridge near campus. He was last seen running before dawn with his fraternity brothers. Although there’s no proof that the death was connected to the fraternity, there have been numerous reports of criminal activities as well as alcohol-related medical emergencies, which are cited as the reason for the suspension. 

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In August of 2014, freshman Natalie Eaton was impaled by a golf club at an Arkansas State University Kappa Alpha Fraternity part. In what witnesses called a freak accident, a piece of a golf club broke off (when a party-goer used it to hit a football), flew 30 feet across the lawn, and impaled her in the neck. It hit her spinal cord directly, and doctors assumed she would be completely paralyzed. As of early 2015, Natalie was still participating in physical therapy and able to walk using canes and the help of therapists. The incident left Eaton with Brown Sequard syndrome, a common condition for sufferers of spinal cord injury that causes weakness or paralysis on one side of the body and a loss of sensation on the opposite side. 

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If you haven’t heard about “deranged sorority girl” Rebecca Martinson’s angry email to her “awkward” and “boring” sorority sisters, log onto Funny or Die RIGHT NOW and watch their dramatic reading.

The shorter version: Basically, Rebecca’s sorority, the Delta Gammas of the University of Maryland, was not living up to her high standards. So she wrote them a nasty email, which was then leaked and inevitably went viral. You can find the entire email here.

Rebecca has since resigned from Delta Gamma.

In 2015, police received a tip about a private Facebook group page operated by Penn State’s Kappa Delta Rho members that allegedly contained voyeuristic photos. The page was primarily a means of sharing—without consent—nude photos of women who were passed out, sleeping, or otherwise incapacitated. The group, with 144 members, was titled “2.0” because the original page was taken down after a woman threatened to report the group for posting nude photos of her. Upon the page’s discovery, the chapter was promptly suspended for a year.

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University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter nearly broke the internet in early 2015 with a 10-second video featuring a racist chant. The fraternity was founded in Alabama in 1856, and according to the Washington Post, has a “strong connection to the Confederacy.” Apparently, they’re not aware that it’s 2015. Watch the video here.

The fraternity has since been closed and its members have been suspended.

Image via Nicholas Benson

In November 2014, Rolling Stone published an article titled “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA” that recounted the alleged gang-rape of a woman named Jackie at a University of Virginia frat house in 2012. Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity named in the article, suspended the activities of its UVA chapter the day after the article was published and the UVA president, facing pressure from the outraged community, suspended all Greek organizations temporarily.

After the initial outrage, some began questioning the article’s credibility and only a month after its publication, the story quickly began to unravel. The accused fraternity reported that it hadn’t hosted any functions on the day of the alleged sexual assault and Jackie’s friends told the Washington Post that they were beginning to doubt her story. 

Rolling Stone has since retracted the story and apologized extensively for its inaccuracies and the cursory (or complete lack of) research done to corroborate the story. Jackie and her friends still maintain that she was sexually assaulted, but not in the manner, at the place, or by the people mentioned in the article. In January of 2015, local police reported that they were “not able to conclude to any substantive degree that an incident occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house or any other fraternity house, for that matter,” adding, "That doesn’t mean something terrible didn’t happen to Jackie … we’re just not able to gather sufficient facts to determine what that is.”

In April of 2015, the UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi announced its plan to move forward with a lawsuit against Rolling Stone magazine for its false allegations and the harm it caused the organization.

Image via Bob Mical

Author Alot Education Team Last Updated: September 25, 2015